Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

Reviews
"Being Dead" by Jim Crace
A haunting novel about a couple caught and killed in flagrante delicto -- how they got there, and what happens before they're found.
By Gary Krist
[03/30/00]

Ivory Tower
Poison pen
The execution of writer Robert Brasillach for "intellectual crimes" during World War II raises questions we still don't know how to answer.
By Lawrence Osborne
[03/29/00]

Reviews
"The Fig Eater" by Jody Shields
A first-time novelist, recasting a Freudian case history as a psychosexual detective story, wonders what would have happened if "Dora" had been murdered.
By Maria Russo
[03/29/00]

John-John, I kinda knew ye
And I'm going to make a bundle writing about you. A JFK Jr. underling pens a memoir.
By Craig Offman
[03/28/00]

The revolution that wasn't
Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old.
By Steven M. Zeitchik
[03/28/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

As I listened to Birkerts' familiar jeremiad, I found myself squirming in the itchy discomfort I always feel when I disagree with someone but find myself tongue-and-mind tied, unable to articulate what's wrong. He says we are losing the ability to read deeply. The speed of the Internet speeds up our minds. We race through sites, grabbing snippets of data as we skip and skim nimbly over oceans of information. The time is always Now; hypertext connections sizzle and evaporate.

The Future of the Book Salon examines how the digital revolution is changing what and how we read.   Read also: Brave new e-books We've seen the future of publishing, and the wrong people are freaking out. By Craig Offman   The revolution that wasn't Stephen King's e-book success proves that the new boss will be the same as the old. By Steven M. Zeitchik

It's not just slow and immersive reading we're losing, Birkerts says. We've reached a critical juncture in the transition from print culture to screen culture. We're metamorphosing from individual and private people to fungible, Web-linked brain connectors in a bright, buzzy, gregarious info-hive.

I empathize with his worries. I share many of them, short attention spans for example. And I share Birkerts' love for close reading, the attentive scrutiny of chapter arcs, paragraph composition, sentence structure, punctuation: all the minutiae that undergird the gorgeous scenes and portraits readers respond to in books they love.

But now, Birkerts thinks, this new technology, chatty and endlessly in the know, is changing not only our reading and thinking habits, but our very selves. Human beings are so adaptable, they're sure to get with the digital program: speedy information scanning, our brains mimicking computers, all data, no deep and complicated conversions to knowledge, and no housing anymore for a soul. I think he's wrong, in large part because his idea of print culture is so shallow -- what I distill from it is a nostalgic image of a reader, arms full of fresh books from the library, ambling through the tree-lined streets of a small town to the comfy chair in a quiet room. This has never been reality, as Birkerts knows, but even as an ideal or a standard for a civilized life it's too narrow to be inspiring.

I'll begin by proving his point about adaptability. This most human of qualities is now, in Birkerts' eyes, no longer a positive trait. In adapting to new reading and writing technologies, he tells us we are leaving our souls behind.

In cultural terms, I've gone from zero to 60 mph in less than 50 years. My childhood, in post-war Munich and then in a farming village near the Czech border, lacked the following: indoor toilets, newspapers, magazines, radio, bookstores, libraries and people who minded their absence. I received two books a year, Christmas and birthday.

Cut to the U.S after my family immigrated. One of the first singers I heard on our new radio was Elvis. I was immediately smitten. Same reaction a few years later to the Beatles. I traded the "Niebelungenlied" and the Brothers Grimm for Superman, Spiderman and Nancy Drew. We got a TV. In high school, I wrote papers in long hand, until my parents bought me an Olympia manual typewriter in my senior year. In the '70s I started using an electric machine; that was followed by an electronic typewriter with a one-line screen where I could make corrections before committing the words to the paper in the carriage. I entered the computer age in 1990, and toward the end of the century, I embraced the Netscape browser, AltaVista's search engine and an e-mail address. I'm a filament on the Web, linked intricately to all the other strands, all of us part of a humming, roaming, free-associative consciousness.

There are literary Internet cheerleaders -- Bart Kosko, Robert Coover and George Landow spring to mind -- who enthusiastically endorse this progressive interactivity of minds and chips. For them, and all the young techies out there, the fully uplinked brain is a teleology devoutly to be welcomed.

Birkerts shudders. Will the solitary, meditative individual die out? Will the fully wired, electrified world have any use for the reader, the dreamer, the critic, the scholar, the poet, each grappling with complex ideas, emotions and questions in a quiet room alone? Or will the last surviving reader and writer someday close their books forever, shut off the reading lamps and fire up the screen?

Next page | Screen or book? I'll take both, please